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Making Colossal Games with the Creators of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus

When Ueda pitches a game to Sony, he doesn't do it with PowerPoint slides or some sort of design document. As an artist with a background in computer animation, Ueda creates a short movie to show off what he wants the gameplay to look like. He said it was the best way to express himself.

Ueda simply sits down at a single desktop workstation, presumably loads himself up with coffee, and cranks away at his vision. The ICO trailer took four months to create in 1997, but showed off the type of game Ueda had in mind. To our delight, he and Kaido had brought the original trailer with them from Japan to show off.

Why does ICO's main character have horns on his head? The answer might surprise you.

Watching the original trailer was fascinating. One the one hand, the look of the game was there: impossibly huge castles, bright sunlight, eerie shadows, and broken stone. The main character was still a small boy, but he had no horns. Instead it was the girl who had horns. Her body was covered with glowing symbols, and she seemed far more athletic than she was in the final game. The story wasn't fleshed out (there was no dialogue, of course, and only placeholder music), but it was clear that the game would center around these two unusual characters solving puzzles and fleeing danger.

Of course, it was clear that Ueda's vision had changed throughout the production. The original trailer showed sprawling towns packed with villagers, and (almost comical) flying suits of armor that shot lasers at the heroes. The final product didn't have any of this fluff: it focused only on the relationship between the boy and the Princess, and the interplay between light and shadow.

When it came time to pitch an idea for another new game, Ueda once again holed himself up and created a trailer, which was also displayed for the crowd at DICE. The game that became Shadow of the Colossus was originally called NICO, and was intended to be a sequel. This time, the trailer looked amazingly like the final game. Several horsemen with horns on their heads rode along next to a striding colossus, and each attacked it. One was crushed underfoot, the other wounded it with a bow, and the third leapt onto the creature, scaled its massive hide, and stabbed it in the head with his sword. It spurted black shadowy blood and fell crashing to the ground, the creature's immense scale clear even from the short video. The look of the trailer very closely resembled the final product (no surprise: it was actually rendered in real-time using the ICO engine on the PS2). Created four years before the game finally shipped, it was a real artistic triumph -- like Babe Ruth pointing to the stands and then knocking one out of the park, the team called their shot and then delivered.

Common Themes ... and Horns

One of the most identifiable traits of the main character in ICO is the set of horns on his head. Lanning pointed out that horns are usually reserved for evil characters in Western tradition, and asked what the significance of the horns were.

Ueda's answer was a practical one: He said that so often in ICO the camera would be zoomed out, and he wanted a way to highlight the main character. So he gave him horns, so that he'd stand out. He laughed, saying that everyone expected that he saw it in a dream or something, but the real reason for the horns was simple and practical.

Next, Lanning compared the two games and asked if they shared any themes. Although ICO and Colossus have a very similar look, the gameplay for each is very different. Ueda and Kaido replied that in either case they were simply looking for ways to play around with existing gameplay conventions. In ICO, they took the idea of a health meter, and they made it into a character. In Colossus, they took the idea of a level, and turned it into a character. "In either case," Ueda explained, "We brought life to what was already there."